How Could 3D Printing Grow Brisbane

How Could 3D Printing Grow Brisbane

The River City is home to around 2.5 million people and enjoys some pretty good weather, not surprisingly this means the population in the Greater Brisbane area is expected to rise to almost 3.5 million in the next 20 years.

It’s reasonable to expect that in that timeframe, and partly due to the influences of all the extra people, that the local economy will change. Currently Healthcare, professional based services and education help top the list of industries with most employment, but that could change, at the same time the way those jobs are done will change.

The largest employment industry is Healthcare and Social Assistance, and in this respect 3D printing is providing a global train of progress for Brisbane to jump onto and help lead. The global medical industry has well taken note of the benefits of SLM titanium printing for replacement vertebrae, joints, facial structures, dentures, SLS plastic printing of test anatomy for surgery planning and the new buzzword – Bioprinting.

Bioprinting is an interesting one, not only does it open up possibilities like manufacturing organs, but also the moral question of how far do you go? If history is anything to go by probably too far before we realise what we’ve done, but we do have a choice and that does not have to be the inevitable outcome.

Queensland University of Technology and the Ashgrove, Brisbane based Hear and Say Centre are crowdfunding their way towards printing prosthetic ears for children with microtia – where the ears are under developed. Only one in 12,000 people are affected by it but Queensland has the chance to lead the world with this innovation.

The ears come from digital scans, usually of the child’s ‘good’ ear or a family members, and are then printed using the persons own tissue and cartilage samples so that in theory the ear is ‘theirs’.

This I firmly believe is just the start, in 20 years Brisbane could be a world hub for patient specific bio implants and surgery.

Professional services are another majority employment industry, quite a broad title but there some important aspects I have personally seen benefit from 3D printing that I will talk about.

Firstly architecture. This has been helped not so much yet in buildings being 3D printed, but in the planning stages. Local architecture firm Richards and Spence based in Fortitude Valley have been designing a new hotel to be located on James St. in the same suburb. To give the client a physical/emotional perspective to the project then the firm asked for a scaled and simplified version to be 3D printed so as to bring digital renders to life. We printed it in one piece and the result was impressive. This though is one example of many architect firms who have turned to printed models to showcase their designs.

Furthermore, printing concept models is only one way professional services have benefitted. The way ideas are being designed is changing.

Many consultants of numerous industries, but particularly engineering and architecture, are looking for ever more organic shapes to optimise strength, save material and stand out from the crowd. 3D printing enables this in ways not formerly possible, by removing constraints of manufacturing capabilities and most importantly, restraints of creativity and thinking.

Educational sectors will see big changes too. As new jobs are required and developed then there needs to be people to fill those roles. Until robots take over that is.

Awareness of additive manufacturing in the state has been helped greatly by the Beyond 3D Printing Expo held late last year at the State Library of Queensland, in conjunction with Griffith University. A showcase of all manner of printed objects it serves to demonstrate, more so to the general public than business, what is possible. This exposure generates interest in younger generations who may well one day decide they want a job in the industry. The more young people who want to learn about it the more incentive tertiary institutes have to develop courses for them.

In primary schools many now have 3D desktop printers from which the kids can learn from. Companies like 3D Printing Systems are developing STEM kits which can be printed and combined with simple electronics to teach kids how to make a watch, or robot.

Brisbane, in reality like all cities, has a symbiotic relationship with its surrounding environment and landscape. Cities have a huge impact on their surroundings due to the large amount of people condensed into a relatively small area. This does create the issue of pollution and energy consumption, that moving forward society will need to address ever more efficiently as the population grows.

Pollution wise then plastics are one of the worst offenders, though they also are what the majority of 3D printers use as raw material. I’ve written about this before but the concept involves recycling waste plastics collected into material to be used for building new parts. The collection part can be done through the usual council recycling initiatives and the re-purposing can be done by companies such as Astron Plastics, based in Eagle Farm. They usually produce items like recycled pellets which can then be rewound into filament for extruder printers. This would increase the value of waste plastics and thereby incentivise more efficient collection as well as thorough education to people of correct recycling habits. It also uses less power than producing virgin material.

We’re coming into an age now too where electronics can now be printed, currently pioneered by Israeli company Nanodimension, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to believe that in the next few decades we’ll have local business’s making our own solar panels custom designed to the contours of whatever we wish, be it roof, pool, car etc.